Haswell Review

Haswell: Can a laptop CPU keep enthusiasts happy?

Faster hardware shouldn’t be this somber. Yet we can’t help but furrow our brow in concern over Intel’s fourth-generation Core i7 CPU, Haswell. Yes, in typical Intel fashion, it’s a tour de force of technical achievement and features that’s the envy of the free world. It’s also, by the way, quite fast.

How fast? *Spoiler alert* Let’s just say that the new Core i7-4770K easily unseats the previous midrange sweetheart, the Core i7-3770K, as the best all-around performer, and even gives the high-end hexa-core part a hard time.

So, why are we so sad? Maybe it’s the continual whispers of the PC’s impending doom—that despite the pure joy a powerful PC can bring the world, its days are numbered.

Or maybe it’s because it’s clear that, while Haswell is fast, it’s a part that is obviously designed primarily to benefit laptops, tablets, and other small-computing needs rather than desktops. Let’s just say, as happy as we are about where Haswell lands in performance, we’re still concerned about Intel’s commitment to performance desktop computing, and that doesn’t make us feel good.

The Haswell Lineup

One new Haswell includes the south bridge inside the package.

Haswell’s Mixed Bag

A new platform is just one of the features that might irk enthusiasts. The most noticeable change for any enthusiast is the introduction of a new socket. LGA1155 has carried us from Sandy Bridge through Ivy Bridge, but as Intel doesn’t like you to ever get too comfortable with a motherboard, it’s shedding that old LGA1155 for a new LGA1150 socket. The two are, of course, incompatible. Why? It’s not just to piss you off, but more likely due to the fact that Intel can’t integrate the new Haswell features in LGA1155. The new socket should come as no surprise to anyone who reads Maximum PC, as we’ve been reporting on Intel’s plan for Haswell for a while, but here it is officially: If you want the new CPU, you need a new motherboard. AMD /AM3+ fanboys can feel free to unleash a big Nelson Muntz–style “ha-ha!” in the faces of Intel fanboys.

You're going to need a new 1150-socket Mobo for Haswell

Got a Spare FIVR, Buddy?

We’ve long said that Intel’s CPUs are gravitational black holes sucking everything into them. Nehalem ate the memory controller. Lynnfield swallowed PCIe. Sandy Bridge gobbled up graphics. And Haswell has a new fully integrated voltage regulator, or FIVR, inside the package. By integrating the voltage regulator, Intel simplifies power inputs into the CPU but also takes a lot of the control out of the motherboard makers’ hands. The FIVR doesn’t eliminate all voltage regulation on the motherboard, as the power to the CPU must still come from somewhere, so you’ll still find boards with beefy caps and voltage regulation circuits.

By integrating the VR, though, Intel is able to regulate power to a much finer degree than has been possible on even the best motherboards. Voltage ripple is practically nil on the design, and the performance of the FIVR outstrips anything that can be done externally. The FIVR also technically lowers the cost of a motherboard, as some of the external voltage regulators are no longer needed.

The FIVR isn’t a free ride, though. It adds more heat to the CPU and raises the TDP of the 4770K to 84 watts compared to the 77 watts of its predecessor.

The bigger question for desktops users is, why? The hard truth is that we suspect the change was not done to benefit desktop PCs. It’s to benefit laptops, all-in-ones, and anything else that really needs precise control over power and voltage in a very thin package. In other words, it’s a move that’s all about mobile and small computing. The good news is that it doesn’t seem to hurt enthusiasts very much. Yes, you’ll need beefy cooling to run Haswell overclocked, but you always needed that.

Overclocking Give and Take

When Intel jumped from Lynnfield to Sandy Bridge chips, it left behind the ability to pump up the base clock to overclock a chip. Overclockers still got unlocked “K” CPUs, but even non-K parts could overclock by four bins through the multiplier on Z-series boards. With Haswell, that feature is now gone, so non-K parts are truly clock-blocked in every way possible.

The good news for enthusiasts is that Intel has added more knobs to K-chip overclocking. Borrowing from the Sandy Bridge-E chips, Haswell K chips will now offer additional CPU straps for overclocking. Rather than being limited to just 100MHz and a few megahertz above it, additional ratios of 125MHz, 160MHz, and 250MHz should be available to help overclock the CPU without overclocking PCIe and other clock-sensitive components.

Big Fat L4—Just Not for You

One of the most exciting developments in the Haswell parts list is the new Core i7-4770R. This one chip features a massive 128MB of embedded DRAM, or eDRAM, to ameliorate memory bandwidth issues in graphics. Don’t care about integrated graphics? You should, because the R part’s eDRAM also acts as a massive L4 cache, which, according to some developers, offers a pretty big boost in performance outside of graphics. The really bad news is that you can’t get it in anything other than a BGA chip today. After hearing the objections of the enthusiast tech press (see, we help you sometimes), Intel is looking at the option of offering a socketed R chip.

TSX for Only Some of Us

Much has been said about Intel’s transactional memory feature, or TSX, in Haswell. TSX essentially makes it easier for programmers to write multithreaded code by addressing the complexities of having to lock portions of an array of data. TSX lets the processor handle much of the grunt work. Now for the bad news: TSX is apparently only available on some Haswell chips. Intel wouldn’t say which chips had it and which didn’t, but a leaked chart on Tom’s Hardware indicates that the only two chips we care about—the two unlocked K parts—don’t have it.

And the Good News?

So, Haswell runs a bit hotter, takes some voltage control out of your hands, eliminates the non-K overclocks, doesn’t give enthusiasts access to the large L4 cache version, doesn’t have TSX in the K parts, and, well, requires a new motherboard, too. You’re probably wondering just where the hell the good news is for enthusiasts with Haswell.

Despite all our bitching, we will say that Intel has at least paid attention to the one metric that counts most: performance. Intel didn’t just take an Ivy Bridge die, erase the name, and pencil in Haswell. The company has added new instructions to Haswell, including AVX2 and FMA2, that will eventually benefit you. The company has also increased the execution ports and generally made a lot of nips and tucks in the name of performance. What this means is that, clock for clock, Haswell offers a noticeable performance boost over Ivy Bridge. The full skinny on Haswell’s performance follows, but let’s just say it again: It’s fast. The apparent lack of TSX, fat L4, and multiplier overclocking might give you a frowny face, but maybe the only people who should really have a frowny face are those who just bought into a full-boat LGA1155 system with a top-of-the-line Core i7-3770K chip.

Haswell uses the same 22nm process first used in Ivy Bridge. Intel typically introduces a new process with only minor die changes and reserves bigger moves for the second chip on new process technologies.

I'm fed up with Intel deciding that people with Unlocked K processors don't need fancy new instructions, like VT-D and AES-NI and TSX.. Guess we enthusiasts, who drive the enthusiast market, are just whipping boys. Lucky to take what Intel will give us, and be happy with it.

all of those advanced technologies/instructions/standards/protocols require predictable\verifiable frequencies and voltages (amongst other analog metrics) and thus are electrically/mathematically incompatible with unlocked or overclockable processors

this is why Intel took so long to 'allow' overclocking until they realized they increase goodwill and profit simultaneously by manufacturing 'gimped' Enthusiast and Unlocked parts (*-E, *K, Extreme) which would overclock, render server-class advanced technologies useless and allow them to charge higher prices

this is why doing your own research is a must and why it saddens me MaxPC obsesses over unlockable parts

if you're building a solo socket system with Sandy Bridge or newer, then the Xeon E3-1245 or E3-1230 series of processors (V2 = Ivy Bridge - V3 = Haswell) is the best you can get...and it'll save you a couple bucks usually too!

I'm not sure I agree with you on why Intel "allowed" us to do overclocking. I suspect it's because Intel fully knows the value of the gaming/enthusiast market and that overclocking is a must have check-box feature even if the 80 percent of the people who buy K parts never overclock.

Yes, those Xeon's are great way to get cheaper alternatives to the 3770K/3770 but I my guess is most people don't go that route and if enough people did, Intel would either just raise the prices or slam the door on the use of Xeon's in consumer chipset boards.

I think overclocking is a very valuable aspect of a chip to have because you can indeed get more "free" performance out of most parts. The question as we go forward is how much more value it's going to have as Intel continues to exploit overclocking with Turbo Boost. If you have a stock locked 3.5GHz part that boosts up to 4.5GHz reliably, will there be much value for overclocked parts if overclocking it doesn't get you much more?

Gordon, you are right, it's getting close to that point if overclocking is worth it. I still see some improvement in my "perceived" judgement of starting up a program or gaming speed, but not much these days. Not like the heady old days of yore when I could almost double the clock speed and I REALLY noticed it. I never thought about how Turbo Boost comes close to removing the usefulness of o/cing tho and I will start paying more attention to the Turbo speed.
I tell you one thing, adding a SSD really has a huge effect on my feel for the boot speed and the "snappiness" of launch and web browsing. Going from Sandy Bridge to Ivy Bridge, I hardly noticed.
An interesting aside, Win8 feels much more snappy than Win7 in the desktop and I would hate to have to go back. I am surprised that more people have not commented on this.

Why do those require predictable/verifiable frequencies and voltages? The thermal management and voltage system (whatever it is) keeps track of what bin the CPU cores are on at any time and voltages. Overclocking will not stop it from monitoring and keeping track.

I don't see how some CPU instructions can't be done with an overclock over other instructions.

take Intel's TXT [Trusted Execution Technology] for example (as it'll be the quickest for me to explain)

basically what happens is you've got dedicated hardware in-die that runs various time-sensitive calculations (mayhaps doublechecking the memory return addresses for the datasets in cache currently being manipulated in the registers are still valid; i.e. an in-hardware form of ROP prevention like what Microsoft EMET [Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit] does in software
thus if this is an internal circuit, with limited cases, required a known time parameter to calculate, then suddenly the multiplier increases and the processor operates more frequently than the security extension can, instead of securing your processing at its lowest levels you've know introduced the very real possibility of corrupting your cache/register data without any chance of you or the OS knowing said corruption occurred

it also may help your understanding to point out not everything happening inside modern chips are instruction-based i.e. the new VRM is digital even though the OS and UEFI don't need to instruct it how to work

I am not really sold on the whole integrated graphics movement. Sure,its a great thing for laptops. For enthusiasts its kind of like buying a motherboard with onboard video. You can't SLI it, you cant put it in crossfire. I like bacon and eggs for breakfast, not bacon and cod fish. This to me is some kind of experiment. F Haswell.

Voltage regulation makes all kinds of sense. First, they have as many domains as they want without splitting everything on the motherboard. Second, using 2.5V into the chip means only half the voltage pins will be needed* (and probably less since they are all joined). Third, they shouldn't need to power gate any more, which almost certainly ate a good chunk of voltage passing through the gates.

What I don't understand is why they didn't go straight to 12V (I'm guessing the 22nm transistors can't handle it).

* I've heard that testing pins is one of the most expensive (if not the most expensive) part of the build. While power pins should be cheaper, it still should help. Of course you should ask yourself what are all those 1000+ pins doing now that plenty of power pins aren't needed.

I'm only really excited for Haswell for its iGPU. I'd be really happy if I can get a cheap $700-ish 11" Lenovo Yoga and play BF3 on it. Anand's review tells me I can expect around 45-50 frames per second on medium graphics at 1366 x 768, so Haswell should be perfect for gaming on a cheap 11" ultrabook.

I can't wait to purchase a new Haswell 4770K by the end of July 2013 (when I will have saved up enough money to build my brand new gaming/music production rig). My last build was an AMD budget build that was solely mean to replace a dead computer (so it was more of necessity than geeking out).

I will have $1500 - $2000 to spend, so I also plan on purchasing my very first SSD drive to run the system/programs on.

It's going to be a good summer!

Much thanks for the through review MaximumPC as well as all of the great consistent PC info (especially your 'Build a PC' articles each month, I can't express how much those have helped me in teaching myself how to build these wonderful machines).

If your overclocked system is at all unstable, you're doing it wrong. I've had heavily overclocked i7-920, 2600k and now 3570k. They've all been completely stable.

Why overclock? Much more power for less money. This 3570k has been super stable at 4.5ghz turbo frequency, up from the stock of 3.8ghz. Gives my games plenty of room and ensures I'm never CPU limited (Skyrim with mods!)

actually when you overclock stably it almost always means you spent more $$$ than you needed to expend and often have a less powerful system than possible for the price; it ALWAYS means a less-efficient rig, with lop-sided performance characteristics and a shorter lifespan even when done right, stably

nothing is x86-core-limited with an Intel processor; look what you gave up by overclocking and how much more you paid

of course depending on your needs, usage, plans, budget etc. it can usually be wiser to either buy a cheaper Haswell processor/motherboard then upgrade with any top-of-the-line Broadwell motherboard and the Xeon E3-1245V4 when they become available 2014-2015 timeframe?

I haven't been interested in overclocking since the socket 7 days, so I don't care in the least that TSX is missing in the K chips. On the other hand, I'm disappointed that there won't be desktop offerings that include the active idle and Iris Pro e functionality.

Sure. Because 20 years ago, it took roughly 24 hours to encode a six minute MP3 on my Pentium 75. Playing the same file back without skipping required me to tiptoe around the machine without touching it. Moving a few jumpers around allowed me to basically double the speed of the computer, allowing me to greatly extend the practical life of my very expensive device. Fast forward to today, and the practical gains I'd see from a typical overclock with my workloads are negligible. Given the amazing speed of my current rig (which is no doubt slower than many), I'd sooner give up performance in exchange for cooler, quieter operation than go the other way. If I had a real need for more processing power, I'd buy another computer or rent a shell account somewhere.

My rule of thumb is that if you don't get at least a 10% bump in speed, overclocking is not worth it. Sandy Bridge was a great o/cer, Ivy Bridge got somewhat closer to that edge, and reports are coming in that Haswell will not be a good o/cing chip.
As these dies shrink and more stuff is put onto the die, the ability to massively overclock is evaporating quickly.

The same seems to be the case where a bunch of guys tried to over clock AMD's A10 or A6, I can't remember exactly on YouTube from 4.1 to 5GHz but the system started to get unstable after 4.3GHz onwards. So it seems overclocking is a thing of the past. Have CPU's speeds hit the ceiling so hard that now their bouncing off it ?
I can't see much difference between ivy bridge and Haswell other than the ability to sleep or go idle sooner. So the latest craze is to save power while preserving performance.

so you're fine paying more $$$ for a lesser chip with most of the advanced technologies that make it an Intel, an Ivy Bridge or whatever disabled and the rest severely limited once you actually do manipulate your multipliers? ark.intel.com/compare/65729,65719,65523,65520

P.S; I didn't bother researching which unlocked chip was equivalent for your 3570k as I'd NEVER buy any disabled chip for myself or my customers and friends but hopefully the 3770k v. e3-1245v2 contrast will make my point and you can extrapolate

Doesn't making the chip more laptop friendly also imply it will have better energy efficiency in the desktop as well?

I know some people don't care about power consumption at their desk, but every little bit helps. It's not a bad thing to be environmentally friendly, especially if the chip is still faster than last gen.

Philippe Lemay asked, "Doesn't making the chip more laptop friendly also imply it will have better energy efficiency in the desktop as well?"

Yes, kind of. It's a faster chip that burns more power under full load than Ivy Bridge, though the performance per watt still increases. It appears that none of the desktop trims support the new active idle states, however.

all of Enermax' current lines of modular PSU's and most of LEPA's support all currently implemented idle states but even if you've the correct Processor/OS/PSU combination some chipsets or/and BIOS' (OEM's UEFI even *sigh*) won't allow it

PSUs are called PSUs because they're precisely that
Power Supply UNITs ...not just powersupplies; in fact what system builders and PSU manufacturers would normally call 'rails' are what IEEE's would call powersupply

so danwat although you're correct, other components will keep load on your PSU...it doesn't matter because there'll be no load on your processor's dedicated rail and significantly lesser load on your motherboard power (unless you're using Gfx cards like the 5670 which require no additional power connectors)
if your PSU isn't designed to adjust accordingly or even if it can...but doesn't follow the standard ways of doing so - it can end poorly for all or part of your system

2600K should be a bit slower than 3820 but they should be close enough. I ran out of bench space and matching components. This was three systems parted out with the same components with another set of parts eaten up by another unannounced CPU.

I gotta say, it's a tough one for you. Core i5-2500K is very good and there are good upgrade options within the socket that doesn't require to do a complete rebuild. On 2500K part, I'd say it's weakest at multi-threaded workloads such as Handbrake, video editing. I've seen 1GHz of overclock on a 2500K basically give up the same performance as a stock 2600K just because of the Hyper-Threading that 2600K has. If you're gaming, I think a mild overclock (if you're not) and upgrading is the better course of action. If you are doing encoding and it's too slow, a 3770K will get you a lot of performance without tearing everything up and those Micro Center walk-in prices are to die for.

I definiltey think people who are LGA1156 and feel it's slow should consider Haswell as should LGA1366 users. But I also think LGA1366 people might be the kind of folks into more threads, so LGA2011 might be the more natural upgrade for them with a 3960K part. It's very much dependent on your workload. For a lot of people, the LGA1156/LGA1366 parts are still fine.

If I was pushing a Core 2 box, moving to Haswell is an upgrade no one will have regrets over.

All indictions are that Broadwell will be a BGA-only part. I think you mean LGA1150 right? I think BGA-only parts appeal to different audiences than the typical enthusiast. Well, the typical enthusiast's main box. Those of us with HTPC/Mini servers/small boxes will probably like Broadwell in BGA form.

I'm not sure we really recommend non-K parts as we think it's a pretty good option generally to have overclocking. Those Xeon's are going to start to get more popular though as more people get word that Intel is selling them at a pretty good discount over their "consumer" equilvalents. Again, I bet if enough people bypass say 4770 (non-K) for a V3 part, Intel will just raise the door or perhaps limit Xeon support in consumer chipsets.